


Translation Theory

by KittyViolet, Magik3



Series: Kitty told me to name this series [6]
Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-11-10 21:42:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11135247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magik3/pseuds/Magik3
Summary: You can love what you have, and still wonder if you might want more.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Some debts here to work by Magik3 and by GoldenThreads; consistent (I hope) with their earlier work. First time I've posted the first chapters before the last chapter's done! Later chapters will have more talking. Also probably more X-characters. Not all characters appear in all chapters.

For a few weeks that indigo shirt was their signal: if Kitty came to bed wearing that, or if she retired earlier than Illyana and she chose to wear that as her sleep-shirt, that meant they belonged in the same bed; it meant that she went to bed hoping that her roommate would wake her up. The sigil on the door had various settings, but none that meant “wake me up, I’ll be dreaming of you.” So that was what the shirt was for: if Kitty wasn’t going to wear it out in the world, to class, to the park, in the daylight—which she had, frankly, expected to do—she’d use that signal for all the information value it could carry.

For example, tonight: Kitty’s already very much sleeping, and Illyana, who has been practicing her translation homework (more on that later), has finally put down all three of her books (the blank one, the one with the Russian originals, the one about more efficient wielding of swords) and come to bed: the glowing sigil says “come in,” Kitty’s in her own bed with the covers pulled up halfway across her ribs, her eyes are very much closed, she’s breathing slowly, and she’s wearing The Shirt.

Ilya-- who is wearing just a button-down work shirt-- kisses Kitty on the bridge of the nose, and on the eyelids, as softly as she can, and draws back the blank. There, of course, is Katya’s palm between her legs: she seems to have fallen asleep either unusually happy, or else hoping somebody in particular would wake her up… probably both…

The Russian girl slides into her friend’s narrow bed, kisses Katya’s eyelids delicately, her neck less delicately, her shoulders in ways that are not delicate at all, and starts to unbutton The Shirt. What’s underneath? 

Kitty does not usually fall asleep without taking off her bra, unless she’s super-exhausted from working out, but this isn’t a daytime bra anyway: Kitty has started to sleep in a soft cotton training bra, or bra-lette, or whatever they’re called, because why? Because she’s self-conscious about her small breasts: they’re tender; they’ve been taking so long to come in; her body is telling her to treat them kindly. Illyana sighs; there’s a front clasp, a single hook that she undoes, and then she moves slowly down her friend’s body and keeps kissing.

“Go on,” Kitty says, gradually falling awake.

Illyana’s tongue is all over a nipple, flicking in circles, then sucking: her best friend’s back is arcing, slowly, up towards her. The youngest X-Man feels solid, confident, totally present underneath Illyana—she’s making quiet nonlinguistic sounds, sounds that nobody could transcribe, let alone translate, but that have to mean “keep going,” and Illyana does keep going, circling the tenderest part with her tongue, as if she were investigating a brass instrument… 

Brass instruments have mouthpieces; they also have keys, or buttons, for fingers to press. Illyana moves her free hand down and down to where Kitty’s hand used to be, minutes ago, and Kitty lets her, guides her; now she’s stroking and concentrating on Kitty’s increasingly wet underpants, moves them to slip her hand inside, strokes, staying in rhythm…

…and Kitty begins to phase. “Oh,” she says. “Um, I’m…”

Illyana Rasputina has a hypothesis. She keeps her hand where it is, but stops its motion, and turns her attention to those sensitive, smooth, flattened-out (since Kitty is on her back) breasts, sucking hard on one nipple again while turning and pressing the other—and Kitty’s all there again, totally present, saying “Oh!” and trying not to say it so loud.

It’s an opportunity to please her friend intensely and quickly—or an opportunity to play a game: more pressure, more attention to Katya’s nipples, and the two girls are equally solid, equally there in their bones. Illyana’s hand goes back between her friend’s legs, touches her entrance, and Kitty smiles, closes her eyes, starts to fade—to phase—

Illyana sucks hard on that nipple, curls her tongue around it again, and in a second her best friend is fully solid… it’s like playing with a yo-yo, except that it’s super-hot, and while Illyana has never been able to manage a yo-yo, making Kitty rise and fall, or making her slightly unsolid and then very solid again, touching her down and then up, is something Ilya knows how to do.

This could go on, if not all night, for an indefinite span of fun: touch Kitty down there, and she’s turned out, but that also turns on her powers; touch, or lick, up here, and she’s solid again. It could, Illyana thinks, become a binary communication, a Morse code… 100 100 001…111 000 111 111 000...

“SOS,” Kitty says. “May I come to the rescue?” She flips her friend over and now it’s Kitty deriving imagined sustenance from Illyana’s real strength, unbuttoning her button-down workshirt very fast, and doing new things with her tongue, first to Ilya’s nipples, to her rib cage, to her lifted, muscular belly, to the tops of her thighs, to her inner thighs… 

Digital communication, Kitty puns to herself, as she moves her fingers over and into the outside of Illyana’s lips. Her curly dark hair falls over her friend’s outer thighs, and she tastes what’s beneath it, then sits up and moves her fingers back... Illyana's thighs begin to contract; the strength of the world, Kitty thinks, is right there, for her...

When Magik comes—or at least when she comes with Kitty—it is not, as the books call it, a release; it’s more like Illyana Rasputin’s whole body seizing possession of itself and of her lover and of the whole world, saying, in a glorious, brassy, way, “Mine!,” contracting around Kitty’s left hand. 

Also Ilya said something in Russian. When she’s really excited, really right there on the edge, that sometimes happens. Kitty never asks what her friend says, but she knows things are good when the Russian comes out; she can tell from the tone.

It would be scary if it were not, also, awesome, and it would be something either to do again, or to have a conversation about, if it had happened at some time other than 1:45 in the morning. Tangled in each other’s arms and legs, underwear still on, Kitty’s soft bra still undone but dangling around her arm, they decide instead to get some sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Doug moved into the X-Mansion this year—his parents did not entirely understand why he couldn’t just stay at home, and in fact he sleeps at home four days a week, but the training he’s doing means he has to sleep on campus the other three (Professor X compared it to hockey, which helped; Doug’s father played college hockey far upstate). Because he’s only a half-time boarder at the moment he got a small single room. This morning’s one of the three or four he’s supposed to wake up on campus, but if you were to invade his privacy enough to peek into his bedroom at 6:45 in the morning this morning you would not see anything of him.

You would, however, see, resting on but not in his bed, an egg-shaped, mostly black, metallic, six-and-a-half-foot long object covered in circuitry and softly blinking lights.

You would also, if you were a recording drone, or if you had walked in on them, hear, from inside the egg-shaped object, soft conversations, interspersed with moans.

“That’s right. That’s right. Too fast! Stop… no, that’s… oh.”

SELFSOULFRIEND PREFER HELDINPLACE TO BE WHILE STROKING BACKANDFORTH ANKLES? asks the metallic egg. SELFFRIEND HAS LOVEPART FREQUENCY WILL INTENSIFY.

“Intensify,” says the blond young man inside the egg. “Intensify. I love to wake up inside you, You’ve in my dreams too, I’m so into you… I… oh.”

There are more overtones from inside the egg; like a vacuum cleaner, like a vacuum cleaner on carpet setting, like an uncommonly exciting Kraftwerk record (Doug is into Kraftwerk). “Oh.” Bumps and gears extrude from the egg, corresponding to slight, tickling wires and fingerlike rods underneath. “Oh. Oh. Go. I, oh.” The rods move faster, quietly. Doug is not quite quiet.

SELFSOULFRIEND LANGUAGE MONOSYLLABLES INTERPRET WELCOME TOUCHES. MUTUALTOGETHER. SELFSOUL SOULFRIEND. The egg seems to shiver. There’s another sound, this time unmusical, like a tap, like a dryer. SOULFRIEND INVARIABLY LIPSMILES DURING EXTRAQUICK FLUID REMOVAL. AFFECTIONSMILE I UNDERSTAND BUT NOT AMUSEMENTSMILE. EXPLANATION?

“It’s just,” Doug manages, “kind of cool and funny… to see… what we would probably have to call a vibrator… turn into… that really gentle thing that I don’t know what it would have to be called but I guess… a mini-wet vac plus a tiny hand dryer? Anyway, it’s kind of great, which we totally get together, and it’s OK that you don’t see why it’s funny too. You’re constantly doing things that are new and great and funny because they’re new. You’re—oh—we’re good together”

DANGERROOM OPENS SELF + SELFSOULFRIEND EXPECT TWENTY MINUTES? NOT DISAPPOINT TEAMMATE FRIENDS PROFESSORFRIENDS Warlock asks.

“I was hoping for a slice of toast,” Doug says, “and I wanted to write down this idea I have about double vowels in Ojibwe.”

The egg hatches. A delighted blond young man wearing only a T-shirt steps out. The T-shirt has the Atari logo—three bars, parallel at the top, diverging at the bottom—and what appears to be Thai script underneath.

SELFFRIEND DAYTIMEWEAR NIGHTTIMEWEAR? Warlock asks, shaping one of his hands into a 3-D Atari logo himself: it looks like a joystick without the plastic shell, wires showing everywhere. (The joystick, Doug thinks, looks like something else. It’s an old joke.)

Doug pulls on the black tights that belong with the New Mutants costume, looks down at the shirt he slept in, decides to keep it on all day. Kitty gave it to him, and recently—she mail-ordered it from somewhere (maybe even from Thailand?) with him in mind.

Is it weird that he and Warlock are who they are, what they are, together, and he’s slept in Kitty’s gift for him? Should he think it’s a problem? Would she?

The teen language genius and the gentle technarch leave their narrow room and head downstairs.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doug has something to tell Kitty. Does Kitty have anything she wants to tell Doug?

It’s late afternoon in the X-Mansion kitchen and Doug Ramsey has been waiting half an hour for his best human friend to show up. He holds a mug of cooling tea in one hand and Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color in the other; he’s nibbled his way through most of a corn muffin, and he’s stopped reading and started staring uneasily at the untouched second mug across from him.

The problem, he thinks, is that not everything is a language. People (baseline humans, mutants, adults, teens, whoever) sometimes can’t say what they mean, or don’t know what they mean, or can’t explain—even to themselves—how they feel. Warlock might be that way too (and who knows where Warlock is, by the way? maybe not even Warlock, although he could use his global positioning system to check if he ever gets lost): Warlock might not be transparent to himself, any more than humans are, but Warlock might also be able to read his own code, to see what lines are causing problems, what microcircuitry got nudged just a hair off.

Human people, on the other hand, so often can’t tell you what’s going on inside them. Sometimes we can’t even tell ourselves—but Doug finally can: the mutant who can understand any language has realized that his feelings about Kitty are strong enough and complicated enough that he has to share them with her, and his best nonhuman friend—the gentle technarch Warlock—has encouraged him, in his inimitable way. “SELFSOULFRIEND COMMUNICATE JOELHIT” was his first try, and after initial frustration—Doug hasn’t thought about Billy Joel since eighth grade—realized that his cybernetic roommate had tried for a reference to “Tell Her About It.” 

A groan, and then a conversation, later, Cypher is making tea, and waiting, and waiting. Touching the cuffs on his button-down shirt, and waiting. Underlining enigmatic sentences about the relativity of perception, about observer-dependence, and waiting.

And then there’s Kitty, who looks, as usual, at once glad to be there and sheepishly late. “I’ve been working on my transitions and walls,” she says. “Super-narrow ones in today’s workout, and then an extra challenge I set myself: to get from there to here”—that is, from the Danger Room to the changing room up two flights of stairs and down a surprisingly long collection of corridors, some hospital-like, some old wood—“without using doors, without looking at any maps, and without breaking any machines.” Indeed, she’s come through the wainscoting, the breadbox and a series of high-backed chairs without touching or breaking the fridge. “You wanted to be sure to talk to me today, and I don’t think it’s about… philosophy?” She examines the slim blue book.

 

Cypher offers her tea. She accepts, leaning forward across the back of a chair. Neither one is in X-uniform: he’s got a yellow button-down and overfamiliar khakis; she’s in a zigzag-pattern short-sleeved dress and yellow tights. (The tights came from the mall; the dress, from the Shi’ar create-your-own-clothing machine—it’s a tight on her now, but she still likes the way she designed, and she intends to wear it every summer until it won’t let her breathe.)

“I wanted to talk about”—not for the first time, he’s tongue-tied: he can say anything he wants to say, in any language on or off Earth, but first he has to decide what to say—“us? I mean, whether—we’ve been hanging out so much and we can talk about everything and I wondered”—their wrists are touching—“whether we are a thing? or whether we should become, in the modern-day sense, a thing?”

Kitty leans farther forward, kisses Doug on the lips just long enough that he warms up inside, thinks they might be a thing: what should he do with his tongue, if that’s what she wants? But maybe it’s not, after all, what she wants; the kiss ends. She moves back.

“I mean—I thought it would be a good time and it seemed like you—but if you don’t—I mean, I know you were very serious about Peter not that long ago, and he’s older, and we’re just— I mean, I’m happy to be just—“ Of course Doug has no idea what to say next, and he’s not even sure whether it’s his turn to say anything.

Kitty kisses him again and then draws back; this time it’s a peck, the I’m-glad-we’re-friends kind. She squeezes his hand and keeps holding it.

“I can totally see us going out some time, and maybe not just as friends,” she says, “but I’m pretty sure that the time is not now.”

“Because you’re not over Peter?” Doug asks, and regrets having asked, once the words are already out.

“Oh, Peter! No, not Peter.” Kitty, who blushes easily, blushes hard: this time it’s the girl from Illinois who has let words that say too much come out too soon. “I fell so hard for him so soon, and he was so kind, I’m almost embarrassed about being over him now. And I was so mad at him. Like deuterium-into-helium mad. Like self-destruct mad.”

“You don’t really do self-destruct, though,” Doug thinks. A good thing for everyone: Kitty will grit her teeth and complain and break things and run away, but she’ll come back—and when she thinks somebody’s being a jerk, she’ll say so. Enough of the mutants whom Doug has met lately, especially since moving into the house, have turned out to have stoic self-destructive, or dramatically self-destructive, sides; he’s lucky to crush out on someone who won’t.

“I don’t. I just—I mean” (Kitty is about to say too much, and then she does say too much) “I moved on.”

Doug’s heartbeat speeds up, then slows down. If she’s ready to date and she’s not into Peter, why isn’t she into him? he’s so into her: she’s got (from his point of view) the confidence, and the power set, and the math skills, and she’s lithe and acrobatic and sweet to him (and, also, he’s age-appropriate), and—

“If you’ve moved on, maybe we should try to go out somewhere just the two of us so we can figure out---“ Doug’s hand moves closer to Kitty’s again; she lifts hers up and drains the mug of Earl Grey.

Something buzzes around them and Kitty looks up: Doug’s metal pendant starts to buzz, and dangles from his clavicle, over the top button of his shirt, in ways that are pretty definitely non-Newtonian, as if the pendant had a mind of its own. Come to think of it—and Kitty thinks of it—was Cypher even wearing a pendant when he sat down? And what happened to the metal cord that she was so careful to avoid when she phased through the wall and avoided the fridge?

“We should obviously see the Elfquest movie,” Kitty says, “but we should maybe see who else wants to go.”

Doug’s eyes open: too wide to conceal the disappointment. “It’s definitely playing in Port Chester this Saturday. But are you—“ 

Kitty looks right at him. In the tradition of even the best-intentioned straight boys he is almost certainly about to ask whether she’s seeing someone else, or whether she is Available. 

Which makes her angry, not so much at her friend, as at the conventions he’s totally internalized: as if girls were commodities to be bid on until one bidder nailed it down, as if “none of the above,” or “I’m not really dating right now, I’ve got a lot of things I’d like to do with the time it would take to please a guy’ were not an acceptable answer.

But of course if Kitty were totally honest with Doug that’s not the answer she would give: it wouldn’t be right to say that her heart belonged to anybody except herself—she doesn’t want to put it in those terms—but she has something with Ilya that she’s never had and can’t quite imagine with anyone else. It’s not what she feels for guys—and she has had feelings for guys, and she expects that she probably will again, though who knows? it’s something different, warmer, more welcoming, and it’s something that has gone much, much farther into her heart and around her ribs and between her thighs than she has ever gone with a guy. Kitty and Ilya went quite far last night: literally far into each other, since that night’s sex involved more than the usual degree of phrasing.

Kitty blushes again, warmed up by thinking about last night, and then looks up, back to the present, back at Doug, who says, confused and then not confused, “oh.”

“Oh?” Kitty asks.

“Oh,” Doug says. “You’re just—I mean, maybe it’s so easy for us to be friends because really maybe you’re not—you like girls the way that most girls like guys.”

Kitty isn’t sure whether she’s more struck by what Doug has figured out, or by what he hasn’t figured out; she’s definitely amused—as is he; now he’s blushing too—by the way that the mutant whose powers give him complete access to the vocabulary of any language has done exactly what any other normally competent speaker of American 1980s teen English would do in this situation: he has turned in a stuttering, verbally sparse, low-diction performance. 

“And of course you’re not into me romantically, because that means you don’t like guys. Colossus was just—you were figuring things out.”

Kitty does not want to talk about the word “bisexuality” here, but she wants to get the idea across very badly, without hurting Doug, because she loves Ilya, she’s very much into girls, she really has also been known to lust after guys, but she doesn’t lust after Doug.

“Doug,” she says. “You know the competence-performance distinction? I mean, of course you do.”

“What you can say versus what you do say,” he says. “Oh.”

“It’s like that with my lust life,” Kitty says. “I can fall in love with girls, or lust after girls, or lust after boys sometimes too. But right now, at this moment, I don’t.”

“Don’t with anyone?” Doug asks. “Or don’t with—“

There’s definitely something up with the pendant: it’s buzzing and opening out until it becomes a kind of TV screen in midair, with a vibrating pewter-colored frame and stray wires dangling out like shrimp whiskers. 

Then the TV starts playing cartoons: it’s as if somebody had made a Saturday morning cartoon show of the X-Men and the New Mutants (what if there were a cartoon? Kitty thinks; who would watch?), and in the cartoon there are Doug and Kitty talking, just like in real life, except they’re in uniform, and then—oh, there are cartoon Kitty and cartoon Illyana, walking home together; now they’re holding hands; now they’re kissing, and their hands are—

The TV is Warlock, of course, and Doug is watching, open-mouthed and nodding—he understands now that Shadowcat and Magik are an item, that they are more than just roomates and friends.

The show is not OK for broadcast anywhere, even if it’s just cartoons. It’s not something Kitty felt ready to tell Doug directly, though she was going to tell at some point, and if it’s the result of Warlock spying on Kitty and Ilya—Warlock using his powers to creep in their bedrooms with his periscope powers and electronic recording—that is so not OK in so many ways. She’s not blushing now: more like scarlet with rage, though also taken aback—that kind of creeping seems exactly like what she and Doug and Sam and the rest of them had taught ‘lock never to do.

But ‘lock did it. The youngest of the X-men starts to phase as the “TV” keeps hovering beside Doug, now a kind of wedding photo of Kitty and Illyana together, at which he’s still nodding—“If I had known you were together I would have been fine with that, I’m really fine with that, I just—what should I call you,” he’s saying, “there are names from other cultures and non-Indo-European terms that might make more sense for the two of you than ‘gay’ or—“

Katherine Pryde lunges towards part of the picture frame—she’s angry enough to want to disrupt part of Warlock, to leave a bruise.

Instead, Illyana tackles her, the big carved chair falls over in a kitchen that’s empty except for Cypher and Warlock, and Kitty and Illyana fall together, first through a steamy patch of Limbo where their fall is broken by broad vines, and then onto a bed of newly fallen maple leaves, from the grove outside the X-mansion, later that year.

“Ilya!” Kitty says. “What’s going on—I mean, I thought Doug was just asking me out—I didn’t want to be anything but kind to him—but he and Warlock have been spying, and what the hell—“

“No they haven’t,” Illyana says, “and you almost hurt them.” She holds Kitty’s right hand in her left hand; they lock elbows; their shoulders meet. “I just told Warlock. I wanted Warlock to tell Doug. I remember you said it was time that Doug knew.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Kitty and Doug were having a conversation, Illyana and Warlock were having a conversation.

Illyana leans against the shoulder-high wooden shelf in the walk-in pantry—really a closet— drinking from a glass teacup of kvas she'd just stolen from Piotr's poorly-hidden stash. Not that he minded her taking some, just lately she'd been taking most of it. She missed some idea of home. Not a home for her to go back to, like her childhood home, but a place where she and Kitty could be less … circumspect. Not that Russia, in these years, could be that. But the stolen beverage felt like home.

It does not, though, fix her frustration: as usual, she can save her friends from mortal danger, but not from social awkwardness, and from what Illyana overhears—just fragments, nothing like the entire conversation, awkwardness has fallen on Kitty like a summer storm. Kitty and Doug are talking. Having The I Really Like You Talk. Any second now it will turn into the I’m Like You But Not That Way Talk. Hence the walk-in closet and the very cold kvas. She should take it upstairs and get back to that sorcery book, but she wanted to accidentally overhear just a bit more. 

“I know you were very serious about Peter, not that long ago,” she hears Doug say.

She sighs, rolls her eyes, washes out the empty glass—to get to the dishwasher she’d have to move through the kitchen-- and replaces the glass on its shelf, besides a shiny blender whose front panel buttons look like black-and-white dazzle camouflage. 

The blender looks new. Really new, as in: new since ten minutes ago.

"Warlock?" 

The blender spins and whines, slightly. The front buttons turn into wide-open eyes, the speed controls into square teeth.

"Milkshakes?” she asks.

Warlock’s rectangular face-panel shifts away, adorably like human embarrassment. Sometimes he’s far more expressive than Illyana’s human face. I came out of Limbo a bit flat in that way, she thinks. 

"You're trying to listen too. Can't you just grow sensors?" 

DESIREREMAIN INCONSPICUOUS NEARBYADJACENT. SELFSOULFRIENDDOUG PERHAPS IN EMOTIONNEED.

Why would Doug need … moral support? A friend? Unless he was also trying to tell Kitty something. 

"What's he trying to tell Kitty?"

SELFSOULFRIEND WELLBEING SELFBEING EXHIBIT STRONG POSITIVE CORRELATION. CLOSE PROXIMITY COMFORT WARRANTED. POTENTIAL REJECTION MAY REQUIRE EMBRACECLOSEFRIEND.  
FURTHER POTENTIAL DOUGSELFSOULFRIEND FURTHERCOMMUNICATE DISCLOSE::FRIENDKITTY CLOSESKINWARMCLOSENICE CONNECTION SELF::SELFSOULFRIENDDOUG.

"You and Doug? Oh of course. That's great. Me and Kitty too, we're close too."

CLOSESKINWARMCLOSENICE NOCLOTHESCLOSE?

"Oh yeah, very. But, can I ask, how do you do it?"

MULTIVARIABLE EQUATION MANYSOLUTION! CLOSESKINCLOSE SELF::SELFSOULFRIENDDOUG CONTACTOPTIONS EXPERIMENTS! NEWEACHTIME

"Ha, isn't that the truth? Is it strange for you to love a human?"

YESNOYES. SOMETIMES SOLUTION::DIFFICULT::YOU?

"Kitty is … the only easy part of my life." 

One of the buttons on the blender has become much larger than its neighbor. Is Warlock enjoying the conversation, rather than shrinking from it, as Illyana has decided not to do? Maybe it’s better not to keep a secret entirely secret. Maybe nonhumans make the best confidantes. (Illyana thinks about how hard it would be for Professor X to date a human; maybe he, too, has found his ideal match. Then she stops thinking about who her teachers date.)

The blender whirrs, sympathetically.

"Hey, you and me both. I get it, being hunted by your dad. It's messed up. I'm glad you found us. … So, can I ask. Do you even have genitals?"

DEFINEGENITALIA: GAMETEPRODUCING BODYSEGMENT? OR CLOSESKINWARMCLOSESENSITIVE BODYSEGMENT? IF LATTER, WHOLEBODYSURFACE CLOSESKINWARMCLOSE SPECIALSENSITIVE WHEN ACTIVE SELFSOULFRIENDDOUGTOUCH.

Whirr. Hum. Whirr.

DOUGSELFSOULFRIEND FITINSIDE. INTERIORSURFACE. DISTRIBUTED EMOTIONPROCESSING ALLOVERWARLOCK.

“You are all heart.” Illyana reacts to the pun that Warlock may or may not know he’s made, then thinks about the way the young technarch has answered her question directly. If only every human—or every human she cared for—were so direct! Only Kitty and Ororo come close.

The blender’s pitcher segment becomes an egg, and then a convertible, and then a kind of black-and-white electronic bromeliad, and then a lit-up astronaut suit, then just the trousers from the astronaut suit, then part of a blender again.

"I bet Doug loves that."

Whirr.

FRIENDKITTY CLOSEWARMCLOSE COMPARABLE PHENOMENON?

"It's close. It feels like, with Kitty, that I’m touching her heart. The metaphorical one. Touching the center of her. So if all of you is your center, Doug is always touching the most intimate part of you."

The inside of the blender lights up: warm, pink, unmistakable sympathetic. It’s the first conversation either of them have had with a third party about their most intimate lives, and if it’s not overdue it was, at least, due.

 

SELF::COMMUNICATE PRETTYMETAPHOR TO SELFSOULFRIENDDOUG PLEASEPLEASE?

Illyana nods. The blender develops an extraordinarily thick cord that runs across the wall, over the ceiling, and out of the room; it shrinks, but the eyes expand, and it grows bright discs, two of them, very much like human ears.

“Hey, while you're at it, just in case Kitty never gets there in this conversation, is there a way you could let him know about me and Kitty, that we're together? But that's not for anyone else to know, just you and Doug."

The mini-blender with bright ears scoots along its cord, over the ceiling and out of the room.

Illyana takes a few minutes to herself. She likes having time to herself (she felt like she had none in Limbo), even though she also likes the way there’s always someone under the same roof here who cares for her (not true in Limbo). She runs through a few lines of unexpected gloomy Russian poetry from memory (“night, street, lantern, drugstore”), tries to switch to something more optimistic, ends up with a to-do list for Saturday, and then begins to amble out of the walk-in closet, ready to help Kitty shut down the awkward conversation that must be near over by now.

Instead, there’s some sort of screen—is it Warlock?—between them, with cartoon images she can’t make out, and Kitty lunging at Cypher, and at Warlock, and scowling, the way she does when she feels her independence has been compromised, when she feels she’s been told what to do, or spied on.

Or spied on. Warlock must have told Doug, in Kitty’s presence, before telling Doug how Warlock found out, that he had Illyana’s permission to tell…

Kitty is inches away from disrupting Warlock’s circuitry, on purpose or by accident. Time to get her out of there, out of the building. There’s only one way—and it’s less risky than it once was.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Illyana and Kitty find a safe space, but where are they in time?

5.

“What the—Illyana, where are we—why are we—it’s fall?” Kitty sounds not so much accusatory as nonplussed, trying to make sense of what her best friend has done: tackled her and sent her flying, first through a humid, uncomfortable, sulfurous, all too familiar space full of indirect lights and unearthly purples and golds, for a couple of seconds, and then into a pile of maple leaves on the lawn of the X-mansion, in the early morning of a crisp fall day.

When Kitty woke up for the second time this morning (that is, this morning, as she has experienced time) it was spring. (Also spring when she woke up for the first time, though that was when she realized that Ilya was already in her bed, and she didn’t care whether it was November or May.) Six hours, one Danger Room workout, one lunch, and one careful, awkward conversation with Doug Ramsey after that, her best friend is right on top of her, and it’s definitely fall.

Magik disentangles a vine, and then another vine, and then a few ruby-red leaves, from Kitty’s curly hair. The pair of girls are almost embracing each other in the pile of leaves, but Magik has propped herself up now, putting her weight on her arms, so that they can have something less like a nuzzle, or a nervous collapse, and more like a conversation.

“You were going to maybe damage Warlock! You were super-mad. I had to do something.”

“Not injure—I mean I was mad but I would never—I know he can heal—but I mean—I thought he was using his powers to spy on us and then report back to Doug and—“

“You are so smart about so many things but you are willing to believe—“ Illyana stops herself—“the best about people so easily that you are absolutely stunned when you find evidence that you were wrong. And in this case, Katya, I wasn’t going to let you be misled, because Warlock—he is not the worst; much more like the best. And he and Doug—“

Illyana does not blush easily, but she is blushing now. Does she even have permission to say any more? Does Warlock expect her to keep his secret, when she had asked him to share hers?

It’s immaterial: Kitty has figured it out, and she does blush easily. Her cheeks were already red from the sudden cold, and they are positively scarlet now.

“That whirring sound from his room on Thursday that kept getting louder—I mean—“

Illyana covers Katya’s hand with her own. “They do. They are very close and very happy about it and they do all sorts of things together that no—that we would need technology to do, things” (she’s remembering something she read in Russian) “electro-dynamo-mechanical poetry things. I am sure it is not exclusive, though. He—Warlock was talking to me about your conversation with Douglas. He wanted to be sure Doug was not hurt.”

Kitty imagines gears whirring in her own head. First she thinks “what do they do, exactly?” and then she can imagine about twenty ways; after that, she remembers when she only imagined, or fantasized, about other girls, when she was back in Deerfield, when she had no trouble imagining where to put her hands, her lips, her knees, her tongue, and she was embarrassed by what she imagined…

“So,” Kitty says. “You asked Warlock to tell Doug about us, and then you saw him telling Doug about us, Warlock-style, and then you saw me getting mad, and you had to get me out of there so that I would calm down before I did anything really rash, which meant—“ Illyana is nodding yes, conclusively—“that you had to tackle me and teleport through Limbo to this fall? I hope it’s this fall and not, like, 2017, and Arcade is President?”

When Illyana teleports through Limbo, especially when she’s in a hurry, the more specific she gets about the where, the less specific she can be about when. Usually she can fix these sorts of things on the return trip... usually.

Kitty thinks about what could be different in 2017. Arcade could be President. Storm could be running the school. Kitty could be a professor. She and Illyana Rasputin could get married. Who knows? That last possibility... how would that look? What would they wear? Would they stage the wedding right here?


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anything you want to do here before we go home?

Back to the present moment, whatever that is: Magik tackled Kitty and sent them outside the mansion via Limbo, so that Kitty wouldn’t hurt Warlock for having (she thought, wrongly) spied on the girls together, nor for having (this is what actually happened) revealed their romance, with Illyana’s permission, to Doug. But Illyana’s teleportation can also send people forward or backward in time: the girls know where they are, but still need to know when.

The girls are surrounded on three sides by trees, but they can look through the trees carefully at what’s in the driveway, what’s on the roof, who is anyone is in the yard. Wolverine’s there, doing some sort of exercise; he’s the only member of the X-Men who could detect them, with his sense of smell, but he’s also the member of the X-Men most likely to simply leave them be, and he’s the only one whose presence tells them absolutely nothing about what year it is, since he’s always looked a bit grizzled and may not age.

Are there motor vehicles in the driveway? There are a few—Wolverine’s motorcycle; the Chevy with Kentucky plates in which Sam takes the New Mutants into town.

Are there solar panels on the mansion? There are: the same number as this morning, or this spring.

What about Storm’s skylight? Kitty can just see the golden annual she’s growing there, new this year: a wealth of seven petals like wet fireworks pressed against the window, with deep violet splashes at each petal’s edge. She can remember her conversation with Ororo while the weather goddess was potting the seeds: this proud flower would bloom only once.

Same year, then. No worries about extreme displacement, nor about meeting their adult selves. Just about getting back safely.

“Kitty.” Illyana is looking right at her again. “Is it good that Doug knows? Do you think so? I think so.” Magik pauses; her face clouds, then clears. “I wonder about whether we can tell everyone, someday. Then sometimes I want things to stay exactly the way that they are.”

“Sooner or later we can tell absolutely everyone and nothing will change,” says Kitty. “But right now we can trust Doug.”

“Even though he has the hots for you and is also dating Warlock.”

“Because he has the hots for me and is also dating Warlock. Which is kind of cute.” Kitty turns from peach-blush blush back to ruby red, and then back to peach, or ripe nectarine. She’s thinking about her history of falling for boys, or boys falling for her, and what she’s learned, and then remembering that during the years corresponding to Kitty’s up-and-down, powers-just-emerging middle school, Illyana was in Limbo, where the lessons were much harder, and harder to forget.

Magik is wearing well-fitting blue jeans that stop where she’s rolled them up, at her calves. The jeans outline her hips, so that she doesn’t need—but likes to wear—a shiny white belt; above that, a white-on-white spring-and-summer top with butterfly sleeves and a ruffle at the back. And a steel-colored (though really it’s just sheer fabric) choker ribbon. Part breezy prairie princess, part I Control Powers You Can’t Even Name And Would Win Any Fight. Kitty drifts off thinking about her best friend’s confidence, about the sunlight through the trees and over her hair...  
Illyana lets her weight off her hands and falls back onto Kitty. Her blond hair almost covers her friend’s face. “I don’t want to go back,” she says. 

“Just stay in this pile of leaves forever?” Shadowcat flicks a few half-dried leaves off her arm and onto Illyana’s butt, and another into the small of her back. “Live in the near future? What if we meet—“

“Silly Kitty, I want to go back, but not yet. Also I need to cast a spell to focus, then go back through Limbo with powers” (she shudders a bit) “and keep us safe while we do that, and I need about half an hour to recharge if I am going to be that precise. We should just take some time to ourselves right here before I do anything with my powers. Otherwise we might end up at 4:15pm on the right day but in Singapore.”

“As long as it’s not Madripoor. I’ve never been to Singapore—oh.”

Illyana has shifted her weight in a way that, Kitty realizes, must be deliberate. It’s a good choice, if it is a choice. Their mouths meet; Illyana’s full lips circle Kitty’s thinner ones, and their tongues touch.

Illyana rolls aside—the pile of leaves is big enough to give them both the space—and keeps one hand on Kitty’s chest, on the zigzag striped dress, with its complicated neckline. Then she moves that hand across Kitty’s chest, and over the dress, and then inside it, so that the zigzags move slowly up and back. Illyana’s left hand settles on Kitty’s right breast, circling the hardening nipple inside the bra’s soft cup, gently, slowly, now zeroing in, now harder, as Kitty’s nipple gets harder, and harder, and her breathing more pronounced…

“Oh,” Kitty says again. They are extraordinarily sensitive, her nipples, and maybe harder underneath, more substantial, than they were even a short while ago: compared to other girls, both mutant and baseline human, compared to what she’s read about human and mutant physiology, she’s been developing in what she now understands as very slow motion: surely she thinks about her no-longer-flat chest, about the line between pain and pleasure when they’re touched, about what’s up there, more than she ever thought she would, more than other girls— it’s impossibly tender, like freshwater pools are opening up inside her— as if her areolas were expanding in real time, and the real Kitty’s real body were slowly, slowly emerging underneath...

Illyana’s tongue and—carefully, gently—her teeth encircle Kitty’s other nipple, through the dress, and then—the folds of the dress, the strap on her bra move aside—not through the dress.” “Mmmm. Oh,” Kitty says. 

The pools have expanded; they fill her ribs, they rush between her hips, sweet ripples run through them. There are lakes inside her, lakes you could bathe in, lakes in which Kitty could bathe. She goes inside them and Illyana, imagined in a sheer white two-piece bathing suit (which she actually owns) joins her, and they dive into her infinite, sweet wet version of herself, the one that’s been opening up inside her all this time, that’s still opening up from month to month, from minute to minute, right now. 

And then Illyana has one hand under that dress, inside those yellow tights, almost inside Kitty, who breathes in and breathes out and breathes in, until her thighs contract, gratefully, tightly, around that hand, as if the lake inside her had one great last ripple and then settled into its placid, inviting surface, its water sweeter and healthier than even before.

Where are Shadowcat’s hands, in real life, right now, in the pile of leaves? They were nowhere, among the leaves, and now her right hand is between Illyana Rasputin’s legs, grasping and pressing up between her thighs as Illyana stays on top. 

The girls kiss, hungrily this time. Illyana is Kitty’s knight warrior princess everything—and she tastes good too.

Those jeans are thick enough and tight enough that she might be able to—yes: Kitty’s fingers are exactly where both girls want them to be, and she’s moving them back and forth, and up, and in, phasing so that no clothes need be removed, only her fingers, working and playing where Illyana wants them, adagio, andante, moderator, allegro cantabile... upwards and inwards and then Illyana bucks, and exclaims, and breathes out, and settles back down on her friend, quiet, smiling.

They wait almost half an hour, beside each other, saying very little that’s not about the light, and the fall, and the leaves, and then they stand up, and hold hands, and the stepping discs appear, and they’re almost home. It’s almost certainly the same day, but it’s nighttime; they’ve missed the dinner hour. They can eat in the kitchen, again.

“What were we doing, if anyone asks?” Kitty says.

“Translation homework,” Magik says, as they phase in through a hedge and a tall, ornate window. “Douglas was helping.”

There he is in the library, taking his Walkman headphones off his ears—he hasn’t seen them yet, but now he has. “Hungry?” Kitty asks.

“OH-cheen,” Douglas says. He opens a Ziploc bag containing—are they chocolate chips? White chocolate chips? Three mutants and a buzzing, smiling Walkman share a late night snack.


End file.
